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GIS office releases draft address guidance to improve geocoding and data quality; board to review open‑data access plans
Summary
The board heard a GIS office draft that distinguishes location versus mailing addresses and recommends standardized fields, validation and drop‑down town fields to improve matching. Members flagged privacy tradeoffs such as Safe at Home and statutory protections for certain officials.
The Connecticut Data Analysis Technology Advisory Board received a draft address guidance and an update on the open‑data access plan requirement on March 19.
Ashley Bonitz, GIS coordinator, said agencies often mix mailing and physical location addresses in the same field, which reduces geocoding reliability. The draft guidance recommends distinguishing location addresses (geocodable coordinates) from mailing addresses, using drop‑downs for town/municipality fields to reduce entry errors, validating existing datasets to flag incorrect addresses, and consulting privacy rules before sharing data.
Alfredo Herrera and Ashley emphasized the guidance is a scaffold for agency feedback; a feedback window was set (comments due March 27) and the work currently applies to executive‑branch agency testing. Board members raised statutory exceptions such as Safe at Home and protections for judges and law‑enforcement home addresses (statute 8‑27B) that must be respected when publishing address or parcel information.
Scott said the open‑data access plan is statutorily required and agencies are working on consolidated plans; staff turnover slowed the timeline, but the goal is to produce agency plans for board review later in the spring.
Outcome and next steps: agencies will review the address guidance and submit comments; the GIS office offered to help with validation tools and coordinate with assessors and regional councils on parcel/address data concerns.
